Jill Magid Mines Her Gallerist’s Congressional Run for a Probing New Show

Jill Magid‘s latest solo show is more than just a gallery show. It’s part of her dealer Esther Kim Varet’s run for Congress. For the exhibition, at Various Small Fires in Los Angeles, Magid made a replica of the platform in the White House Press Briefing Room, with its star-spangled carpet, and invited Kim Varet to use the work, titled , to deliver stump speeches.

When Kim Varet announced her run for office in January, Magid had already been hard at work on the show. It was originally focused on a deep dive into official books published by U.S. government offices featuring political speeches, as transcribed in stenographers’ notes. There are still elements of Magid’s initial vision present in the final show, but she very much pivoted to respond to Kim Varet’s campaign.

“I’m an artist who makes work about power and accessing power structures, and here the gallerist is running a political campaign for Congress. How can I not do something with that, you know?” she told me.
”For me, it’s important to put myself in an uncomfortable situation.
And make work from that position that provokes or asks questions.”

The exhibition press release consists of Magid’s email to Kim Varet describing the new direction for the show: “You noted that my work is most powerful when it responds to a site or situation. For this reason I am integrating your run for office as a material of the work.”

Magid is careful to note that the show is not meant to be an endorsement of Kim Varet’s candidacy. (The dealer is running as a Democrat to unseat a Republican incumbent in California’s 40th Congressional District, and has already raised over $1 million, according to Ballotpedia.)

“I’m questioning free speech, and democracy, and how platforms work,” Magid said. “Not everyone is getting on a state-sanctioned platform. People are using other kinds of platforms and building other places to speak from. For me, I would never step on that platform. I would speak from the floor.”

Titled “Heart of a Citizen,” the show is largely staged outside, with only in the main gallery space, accompanied by a vitrine of documents related to its creation and the complex campaign finance laws that allow its display in a business owned by a political candidate.

The other two works are displayed outside in the courtyard, with a 15-foot-long neon sign reading hanging on the wall, and 12 cast concrete facsimiles of the artist’s heart, which are titled 

To create the sculptures, Magid got an MRI at the Cleveland Clinic, and enlisted the artificial heart lab (officially called the Therapeutic Technology Design and Development Lab) at the department of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge to fabricate an accurate replica of the organ.

“Everyone kept saying, ‘wow, your heart’s really big!’” Magid said.

But if the gallery is the press briefing room, the courtyard has become the White House Rose Garden. Magid was inspired by Trump’s announcement in February that he would pave the historic space to create a patio like the one at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach golf course. (He said it was because women’s high heels were sinking into the grass.)

“At Various Small Fires, you come off the street and there’s a corridor that opens up on this courtyard with tall cinder block walls, painted white, and then it’s this gray, dusty gravel,” Magid said. “It just worked with this kind of lament about the garden as an inquiry of power.”

And even since the exhibition has opened, Trump has begun to make good on that plan, beginning on June 9 to bulldoze the lawn. (Though the rose garden’s origins can be traced to the early 1900s, noted art collector and horticulturalist Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon created the current design for President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.)

Trump had already put his mark on the Rose Garden in his first term, removing the crab apple trees that had lined the space since the 1960s and replacing many of the colorful flowers with more staid greenery and white roses.

Magid pays tribute to those lost trees with the piece, which is taken directly from a transcript of a Rose Garden speech: “[At this point, a gust of wind rustled the trees in the Rose Garden.]”

She was transfixed by the idea that a stenographer, ostensibly tasked with a straightforward transcription, would write such a poetic note, and that it would become part of our historical record, preserved in the presidential papers.

And then there was the vision the words conjured, contrasted with the work’s surroundings, Magid said. “The courtyard being this very barren, desert-like
space. The sun just beats down on it, and it’s dusty. And then there’s this quote where you can only imagine the trees and the wind and the roses.”

Magid’s work has engaged with landscape architecture before. She is perhaps best known for her efforts to secure the return of the archives of Mexican Modernist architect Luis Barragán (1902–1988) to his homeland from Swiss furniture company Vitra in exchange for a diamond ring made from his compressed ashes.

But her interest in the White House Rose Garden actually originated with the flowers, and how they can have a wide variety of associations. For her 2020 project , Magid engraved the edge of 120,000 pennies with the phrase “THE BODY WAS ALREADY SO FRAGILE” and distributed them at bodegas around New York City.

That sparked an interest in cheap bodega flowers and the flower economy. In October, Magid had a floral-themed solo presentation with Mexico City’s Labor Gallery at Art Basel Paris, complete with an installation of blooms from Paris’s open-air flower markets.

“Heart of a Citizen” is comparatively spartan. But it had other kinds of complications. Presenting required a careful study of campaign finance laws, to avoid financial fraud.

Ahead of the show, Magid actually sold the work to collector Michael Young, who donated it as an in-kind contribution to Kim Varet’s campaign. And because she spoke on the platform at the opening, Kim Varet needed to rent our her own space for the occasion, at the rate of $200 an hour. (The plan is to take on the road for campaign events after the exhibition run.)

“I found it really fascinating and learned a lot about the inner workings of finance and political campaigns,” Magid said.

The exhibition also includes a stack of paperwork. Magid has provided copies of the official U.S. application to run for Congress, and envelopes to mail them off. On the back, she’s stamped each one with a quote from cultural theorist Robert M. Ochshorn, paraphrasing French writer and philosopher Maurice Blanchot, about how one should “only start building platforms once you’ve fully and deeply rejected the notion and premise and promise of platform.”

“I hope,” Magid said, “that  will be a really good place to provoke questions, debate, and dissent.”

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com